The statistics are dismal. The interracial marriages of Black men and White women are twice as likely to crash and burn as anyone else’s. There are twice as many Black male/White female marriages as White male/Black female marriages, but after ten year’s time there are more White male/Black Female marriages still standing. Their marriages are 44% above-average in their survival rates.
As a survivor of a long-term Black male/White female marriage that failed, I want to put in my two-cent theory on all this.
No. I’m not going to blame Black males.
I’m not going to blame White females, either.
I’m going to blame it on the inadequate ideology that exists in America on how we are to relate to one another.
The common etiquette for White people who profess to be White allies is to acknowledge and defer to the burden of racism Black people endure. The correct posture is that of deference. What’s deemed appropriate is to support that person, pay attention to their feelings in a supportive way and, if you really love them and believe in them, do what you can to enable their actualization.
Deference is already pretty much the traditional role females play with their mates. Whether it’s cultural or innate is another issue. The fact remains that a woman with her hands full with young children is likely in need of a mate who can preoccupy himself with slaying the financial dragons. Practical necessity mandates that the support of her husband’s destiny be paramount, since, if the main breadwinner is languishing, everyone in the family languishes.
Adding a racial deference to that gender deference can lead to a relationship becoming seriously out of balance. The yin and yang of it gets out of whack in a strange way that can become very unhealthy. The problem is that the racial deference has within it a silent aspect that inherently demeans manhood. What is unconsciously being communicated to that male ego is that he’s a poor, helpless thing that needs to be babied. Men innately do not respond to that kind of thing very well at all. He’s in a situation where, whether he’s conscious of it or not, he’s being insulted and emasculated at the same time given carte blanche to act out that resentment.
To be honest, the racial deference has always annoyed me and felt grossly unnatural. I am a genocided person living in Diaspora who assimilated to the people here the most like the extinct people I’m from. Those Americans are, in fact, an excellent resource for someone like me. My knee jerk reflex is to respond to Black Americans as leaders, the go-to people who know how to deal with Aryan Supremacy better than my own people have, since, having recently been persecuted into extinction by Aryan Supremacists, we obviously failed completely.*
Unconsciously, I wanted to be deferred to, supported, encouraged, enabled by my hero. The prevailing American racial paradigm, however, does not allow him to be defined as such.
As a person suffering from generational oppression issues, support was certainly what I was in need of, but America dictates another set of expectations. The American stereotype is that I am the ‘privileged’ person in the scenario, irregardless of my personal existential reality.
Consequently, I’ve spent a lifetime giving other people what I needed. I was certainly good at it, since I knew what was needed, needing it myself, but the experience has left me oftentimes entirely drained, even defeated, since I was giving something I didn’t have to begin with. And the edict demanding White deferential behavior reinforces the relentless distress the centuries-long persecution of my people has left me with – that I am someone who does not matter at all.
So what’s happening on the other side of the aisle? Why is the other variation on interracial marriages doing so much better? By the logic I’ve just described, there’s nothing in the dynamic between White men and Black women that undermines the classic male/female exchange. That White husband has no impediments to playing the ‘hero’ to his mate. And she has no impediments to playing the part of the Maid in America being rescued. If anything, the racial dynamic is enhancing it.
And if that husband is doing the racial deference thing for his wife, while she’s doing the gender deference, then you’ve got a pretty ideal marriage – two people who are deferring to each other. Both partners are treating each other like the other is more important. It reminds me of that old tale about the wife who sells her hair to buy her husband a watch fob for Christmas, while he sells his watch to buy jeweled combs for her hair. Neither have useful presents that year, but they sure do have a good time under that mistletoe.
There is an alternate reality, though, an alternate paradigm. We could broaden the conversation beyond a strict definition of racism as something suffered exclusively by people of color. (The word originated in Europe, referring to abuses exploiting differences in religion, ethnicity, nationality or class.) If we broaden the scope to include all oppression, including the abuse of children, or the abuse of women, then the leadership of Black America becomes universally relevant. The Great Overcomers. The Great Liberators. ‘Yes we can,’ as the man said.
Makes sense to me. That’s always been the way I’ve felt about Black America. But then, I’ve been living in a different paradigm, a Balkan racial paradigm throwback. I like my paradigm better. Everywhere I look I see people embodying the Great Overcomer quality I just described. It’s everywhere you look. These people are amazing. I love them to death. Why can’t that be what’s definitive? Why do we have to keep giving power to White Supremacy? Why are we still letting those people define us?
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*The minority Serbs of Croatia historically were 20% of the population. One in four were brutally slaughtered in WWII by Aryan Supremacists as racial inferiors. Those fascists were harbored by the West, and then imported, some say by the CIA, which is known for such tactics, back into Croatia at the end of the Cold War. They resumed their persecutions, culminating in NATO-backed Operation Storm which drove what remained of the Serb population into Diaspora. The population is now at 4%, mostly elderly. It is the only population, out of all those claimed threatened with genocide in that civil war, to have been successfully eliminated. Still hate crimes persist against those old people. Survivors in Diaspora are considered too small a population, too spread out to be culturally viable. The culture that produced Tesla no longer exists.
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